The capacity of the PS5SSD can be a big disappointment — here's why

The capacity of the PS5SSD can be a big disappointment — here's why

We've heard before that the PS5's 825GB SSD may have a significant portion of its storage capacity eaten up by the operating system, but apparently the situation is worse than first thought.

YouTuber YoungYea, with a keen eye, spotted a shot of the storage section in Sony's official PS5 user interface reveal. No games appear to be installed, but the PS5's operating system appears to be consuming about 20% of the console's super-fast SSD.

A bit of caution here: the screenshots captured by the YouTuber appear to be of the console development kit. Therefore, some of the storage space may have been allocated to diagnostic tools or other developer software. Alternatively, the PS5 in the development kit may have a smaller SSD.

Given that PS5-only games require large SSDs (Demon's Souls Remastered requires at least 66 GB), it seems very odd that Sony would surrender more than about 20 GB to the PS5 OS.

The PS5's internal storage is upgradeable with Sony-approved PCIe 4.0 SSDs. However, these SSDs are not yet readily available and will likely be quite expensive.

As developers become more familiar with the PS5 hardware, they will find ways to reduce game size, such as smart texture and asset compression. At launch, however, the PS5's 825 GB SDD may be very fast, but it does not seem to be the way to go for huge game libraries.

And the Xbox Series X is unlikely to fare much better here either: the Xbox Series X has a 1TB SSD. The Xbox One X, however, has a 1TB drive, which is quickly filling up, especially with Xbox Game Pass downloads. Therefore, the same is likely true for the Xbox Series X. An external plug-and-play external SSD is an expensive, but almost mandatory upgrade.

With the Xbox Series X coming out on November 10 and the PS5 on November 12, it won't be long until we can try out these next-gen consoles and see how much storage we can get our hands on.

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